In March 2015, the team at the Mary Rose Trust met with Chiara, who introduced MicroPasts and the various projects that the MicroPasts team had been involved in. The Mary Rose Trust team were hugely impressed with the passion of the collaborators that had contributed to the online projects as well as the quality of the work that had been produced and the possibility of achieving a lot in a very short space of time!

As of May 2016, the 3D models of the artefacts have been viewed about 2,500 times. Although they represent a very small part of the Mary Rose collection, their introduction to a digital 3D space has offered exciting opportunities in developing the accessibility of the collection. So far, the models have been used for outreach activities undertaken by the Mary Rose Team, for preparing ‘replicas’ (via 3D printing) and as digital content for University student projects.

We are excited to see how the models of the Mary Rose artefacts are further utilised going forward, but, interestingly, our current collaborative project between the Mary Rose Trust and MicroPasts does not involve an artefact from the Mary Rose. Instead the item in question is the bell that was recovered from HMS Hood – a Second World War British battle cruiser that was sunk in 1941 (almost 400 years after the Mary Rose sunk in 1545!) by the German Battleship Bismarck, during the Battle of the Denmark Strait. In 2001 the wreck was located by Blue Water Recoveries with the ship’s bell found lying on the seabed away from the hull. In August 2015, Paul G. Allen (co-founder of Microsoft) led an expedition supported by Blue Water Recoveries to retrieve the bell and, soon afterwards, the bell was sent to Mary Rose Archaeological Services for conservation.

The battleship HMS Hood in 1930 during a dockyard refit. Photograph: Hulton Getty.

The bell was presented to the HMS Hood when she was launched, in 1918, by the widow of Rear-Admiral Sir Horace Hood, great-great grandson of Sir Samuel Hood, after whom the ship was named. Sir Horace died at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, one of 1,026 officers and men who died in seconds when the battlecruiser HMS Invincible blew up and sank, and the bell is inscribed to that effect.

HMS Hood bell

The Mary Rose Archaeological Services became involved due to the highly specialist expertise of the Mary Rose Trust conservators in the treatment of artefacts recovered from a marine environment. The National Museum of the Royal Navy were looking to prepare the HMS Hood Bell for display in the 36 Hours: Jutland 1916, The Battle That Won The War exhibition (now open to the public at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard). The bell has been installed as a memorial to the 1,415 men who lost their lives when the ship sank in 1941.

Now you can help create models of the HMS Hood bell before and after conservation!

The Mary Rose Trust are very excited to be working with Micropasts again. This time, we will be working towards the production of a 3D model of the Mary Rose bell, one of the most iconic items to have been raised from the wreck site.

The bell recovered from the Mary Rose was one of the last items to be recovered from the wreck site (it was found under the ship below the starboard side). It was also the last item to be placed into the new Mary Rose Museum. At the Museum’s media launch in May 2013, the bell was processed into the museum by the ship’s company from the Navy’s latest Type 45 warship, HMS Duncan.

The bell was cast in bronze and metallurgy results showed it was made from copper (82%), tin (15%) and lead (1.7%). The Flemish inscription at the top reads ‘Ic ben ghegoten int yaer MCCCCCX’ which translates as ‘I was made in the year 1510’, the year that the Mary Rose was commissioned.

On board ships, the bell was used to signal the time, to mark the change of the watch and as a warning, particularly to other ships in fog.

Two back-to-back workshops were held on 23 September at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. The aim of the MicroPasts Knowledge Exchanges workshops was to share the practices, shortcomings and achievements experienced by the MicroPasts project and use these as fodder for wider discussion about the use and evaluation of both crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding within a broader heritage ‘ecology’.

Below is the programme, with links to videos of the presentationsTwitter discussion via #micropasts

On Friday 22nd May, the Mary Rose Trust and MicroPasts teams launched a collaborative 3D photo-masking pilot project on the MicroPasts crowdsourcing platform. The aim is to create 3D models for three of the museum’s artefacts. We are really grateful to MicroPasts collaborators for helping complete 37% of the application already (as of 29th May)! It is exciting to see people engaging with the collection online, and it will be interesting to discover how the 3D models are viewed, downloaded and used, once developed.

With the project now underway, we would like to take the opportunity to provide some background information on the Mary Rose, the Museum and the artefacts included as part of this first pilot project with MicroPasts.

The Mary Rose was a Tudor warship that sank during a battle with an invading French fleet near Portsmouth, on the South coast of England, in 1545. The hull and her contents were covered (and preserved) by the silts of the Solent. They remained there until they were rediscovered in 1971. Following one of the largest maritime excavations ever undertaken, the hull was eventually raised on 11th October 1982.

In May 2013 a new purpose built museum, that reunited the hull and thousands of her artefacts, was opened to the public. The hull, at the centre of this museum, is undergoing an air drying treatment. This is the final stage of her conservation, a process that has lasted over 30 years. In 2016, the air drying will be completed, the museum will be closed while the walls surrounding the hull are taken down and the museum will then be re-opened with amazing new views of the hull throughout the building.

The current MicroPasts 3D photo-masking pilot project is based around three of the artefacts that can be seen on display in the museum. These are:

Bone angels

The bone plaque of two angels was identified as being similar to those made in the Northern Italian workshops of the Embriachi family who produced a variety of luxury objects such as mirrors, caskets and triptychs that incorporated a series of bone or ivory plaques with stained wood and horn.

The staved wooden tankard was one of the most complete tankards recovered during the excavations on the Mary Rose. It is interesting to note that oak, poplar, pine, beech and willow were all used in its construction.

We’ve just launched the latest part of theMicroPasts project: a crowd-funding website. Have a look at https://crowdfunded.micropasts.org and see if you can help.

Through this website, it is possible to raise up to £5,000 to fund archaeological or historical research projects that have been developed and will be undertaken collaboratively by professionals with institutional links (e.g. working in universities, museums, libraries, etc.) and any volunteer group offline or online. We welcome project proposals from any team,who can be based anywhere in the world. The only kind of activity that we do not fund is excavation.

For more information on how this all works, please see https://crowdfunded.micropasts.org/how-it-works.

If you have a project in need of funding, you can submit a proposal online. We will review it and, if it fits the requirements, you will be able to start your fund-raising campaign.

If you have an idea for a project, but don’t know a ‘professional’ archaeologist or historian to partner with, please do post your idea on the MicroPasts community forum (http://community.micropasts.org) and we will try to help out.